Thursday, January 17, 2013

January 17

###

Whole Fools - Texas Grocer Wingnut John Mackey used to think that Obamacare was Socialism, but now he thinks it is Fascism. This is understandable because he is a Libertarian from Texas. I mean, for Pete's sake, he thinks his stores are Organic. (Think Progress)

###

Dennis Kucinich gets a gig with... Wait a minute, Fox News? You know they're going to treat you like their "resident crazy liberal," while everything you say flies straight over the audience's head, so why? No, really -- here's a great example of the gravitas the audience has come to expect of this super-serious and important news organization. Was Sesame Street not hiring?

There is a loud and strong constituency in this country that sees "science" as an essential threat to liberty, and that sees the president mandating science as being the first step down the slippery slope to the day when he declares himself Barack I, Emperor of the Sun And Moon. I am not joking here. Glenn Beck's batty fantasia, Agenda 21, has been on The New York Times Fiction list for a month now, and I guarantee you that at least 80 percent of the people who bought it think it's on the wrong list. Which brings me to the most important thing about the initiative that will be undertaken by the president today. It is genuinely dangerous.

He took a tentative step toward recognizing that danger at his press conference the other day, when he talked about how effective the NRA and its satellite propagandists are at ginning up an atmosphere of fear and dread over even the baguest hint of a whisper of a threat concerning gun control legislation. At least he said it out loud, which is a start. The dangerous terror is not the threat the NRA holds over the electoral futures of various congresscritters — which is largely illusory anyway — but, rather, the wilderness of scarecrows that it erects in the minds of the people at whom it aims its horror stories. It is simply perilous to the nation continually to inflate every tentative step towards regulating the "militia" well as a global threat to human freedom, or as a precursor to tyranny. Not everyone listens to Alex Jones purely for entertainment. Not everyone reads Glenn Beck purely for the unintentional comedy. There is a serious constituency for this brand of traditional American unreason, and it is strong, and it is armed, and the NRA, as witness to its most recent, revolting advertisement, is not averse to playing to that constituency, which never has been sold on this president in the first place. The president has stepped into an ammunition bunker fully aware that his political opposition is running around the joint with blowtorches. -Charles Pierce on the bravery of the president today.

Yes, that's a big quote, but damn if he isn't absolutely correct. And at a time like this, the NRA continues to question why armed security is good enough for the president and his family but not yours.

###

Media Matters has a collection of reactions from Fox News hosts and conservative columnists which may challenge your preconceived notions about the depth of American stupidity.

###

Just when I thought that right-wing loons could not get any more ridiculous with their 'Obama wants your guns' paranoia and hysteria…Lou Dobbs opens his big fat mouth and proves me wrong. Here's what Dobbs had to say about President Obama and his supposed assault on the constitution. Apparently, Dobbs' decade long slide into total madness continues unabated.

The president is so committed to constraining or dismissing outright our 2nd Amendment rights, it makes you wonder why he's not ridding the Constitution of the 1st Amendment as well. Assembly, free expression, freedom of religion, at least the right to assemble, then implement a curfew, shut down the sale of liquor and drugs. Why don't we close down all the bars and nightclubs, get people off our mean streets in the late hours all across America. That might have economic consequences, right?

You've got to wonder why the president doesn't double down in his assault on the Constitution, taking on not only the Second, but the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Fourteenth. There may be a reason he's begun with the 2nd Amendment. Without our rights under the Second Amendment, removing the rest of our Bill of Rights would be a lot easier. Wouldn't it?

Let's hope everyone understands the priorities of the left here and the reasons they're beginning their effort to roll back our 2nd Amendment rights.

Your Fox crazies at work, folks. Glenn Beck could not have worded conspiracy-minded garbage of that sort any better.

Sometimes I have to wonder if jackasses like Dobbs actually believe the nonsense they spew in their daily anti-Obama tirades or is it all one big fucking game for them. Really, how ignorant and filled with hate must one be to actually believe that the president's request for sensible gun laws is somehow a prelude to annihilating the Bill of Rights?

And meanwhile, feeble-minded monkeys who actually believe the bullshit and fear-mongering uttered by the likes of Dobbs, are on a gun-buying frenzy. Guns and ammunition sales have gone through the roof with an emphasis on purchases of semiautomatic rifles and high capacity magazines which are selling at five times the price they were selling a few weeks back.

"If I had 1,000 AR-15s I could sell them in a week," said Jack Smith, an independent gun dealer in Des Moines, referring to the popular style of semiautomatic rifle that drew national attention after Adam Lanza used one to kill 20 children and 6 adults at a Newtown school. "When I close, they beat on the glass to be let in," Mr. Smith said of his customers. "They'll wave money at me."

…

Dale Raby, who manages one of two Gus's Guns shops in Green Bay, Wis., said his inventory of guns and ammunition was almost cleaned out, and that most of the interest was in AR-15-style rifles.

"I had almost fistfights over the remaining inventory of that type gun," he said.

While gun manufacturers and dealers laugh all the way to the bank, twenty 6-year-olds lie buried as do another917 Americans killed by gunshots sincethe Newtown shooting…but the real craziness has not yet begun. That will happen tomorrow when the President presents his proposals for saner gun laws. That's when the screeching from every self-proclaimed patriot Ted Nugent-loving sociopath with a gun fetish begins in earnest.

It's almost enough to make one lose their faith in humanity.

###

###

###

Texas wants a showdown with the feds over something, anything they don't care what. An unconstitutional law that would make enforcing federal weapons laws a felony in the state will work just as well as defying the Supreme Court and teaching Creationism or refusing to implement the Affordable Care Act. They don't care, any issue will do.